śrī vārāhī nigrahāṣṭakam

Eight verses of nigraha — restraint — and the most uncomfortable text in this group, because what it asks for is that harm be turned back on a person. Each verse names someone who wishes the speaker ill in thought, word or deed, and asks the goddess to act: let him be overturned by the sudden blow of your plough; from that man's heart fill your vessel. The register belongs to a real and old category of protective rite in which the deity is asked to restrain an aggressor rather than the devotee asked to forgive, and the hymn is careful to make the speaker's standing the ground of the request — it is because he is devoted to her feet, and because his own bad karma has been worn away by that devotion, that he asks at all. Its final verse widens beyond the personal, addressing her as the breath in every living thing and the power pervading all that moves and does not move.